{New YouTube Video} The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe (Audiobook)

According to Wikipedia, “”The Fall of the House of Usher” is considered the best example of Poe’s “totality,” where every element and detail is related and relevant.

The theme of the crumbling, haunted castle is a key feature of Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764), which largely contributed in defining the Gothic genre. The presence of a capacious, disintegrating house symbolizing the destruction of the human body is a characteristic element in Poe’s later work.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” shows Poe’s ability to create an emotional tone in his work, specifically feelings of fear, doom, and guilt. These emotions center on Roderick Usher, who, like many Poe characters, suffers from an unnamed disease. Like the narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart”, his disease inflames his hyperactive senses. The illness manifests physically but is based in Roderick’s mental or even moral state. He is sick, it is suggested, because he expects to be sick based on his family’s history of illness and is, therefore, essentially a hypochondriac. Similarly, he buries his sister alive because he expects to bury her alive, creating his own self-fulfilling prophecy.

The House of Usher, itself doubly referring both to the actual structure and the family, plays a significant role in the story. It is the first “character” that the narrator introduces to the reader, presented with a humanized description: its windows are described as “eye-like” twice in the first paragraph. The fissure that develops in its side is symbolic of the decay of the Usher family and the house “dies” along with the two Usher siblings. This connection was emphasized in Roderick’s poem “The Haunted Palace” which seems to be a direct reference to the house that foreshadows doom.

L. Sprague de Camp, in his Lovecraft: A Biography [p. 246f], wrote that “[a]ccording to the late [Poe expert] Thomas O. Mabbott, [H. P.] Lovecraft, in ‘Supernatural Horror’, solved a problem in the interpretation of Poe” by arguing that “Roderick Usher, his sister Madeline, and the house all shared one common soul”. The explicit psychological dimension of this tale has prompted many critics to analyze it as a description of the human psyche, comparing, for instance, the House to the unconscious, and its central crack to a split personality. Mental disorder is also evoked through the themes of melancholy, possible incest, and vampirism. An incestuous relationship between Roderick and Madeline is never explicitly stated, but seems implied by the strange attachment between the two.

Opium, which Poe mentions several times in both his prose and poems, is mentioned twice in the tale. The gloomy sensation occasioned by the dreary landscape around the Usher mansion is compared by the narrator to the sickness caused by the withdrawal symptoms of an opiate-addict. The narrator also describes Roderick Usher’s appearance as that of an “irreclaimable eater of opium.”

Posted by Frank Marcopolos

Frank Marcopolos lives in Austin, Texas. Hiding from the ever-present Texas sun because of a well-founded fear of skin cancer, he writes short stories and novels that have been praised by some readers, while others have been, like, "Meh."
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FrankMarcopolos.com is the home of author and voice-over artist Frank Marcopolos (rhymes with "Metropolis.") Frank was with the 82nd Airborne Division during the war. He now lives in Austin, Texas. Sample his fiction for free here: